POLAND – Two Maine sculptors have accomplished something few American artists have: their work showcased at the Olympics.

Scott Fuller of Poland and Asherah Cinnamon of South Portland have won an Olympic Ring Award as part of the Olympic Landscape Sculpture Contest. Their design – an internally lit glass and steel landscape sculpture in the shape of individual flames – beat over 2,000 other entries for the prize. A model of the artwork has been part of a 110-sculpture international tour for the past year and is slated to be displayed in Tiananmen Square during the Olympic games. A 25-foot-tall full-scale version may also be built.

“It’s been very exciting along the way, each step along the way,” Cinnamon said.

Cinnamon, a full-time artist, and Fuller, an artist and professor at Saint Joseph’s College in Standish, met a few years ago as students at Maine College of Art in Portland. Each wanted to enter the Olympic Landscape Sculpture Contest. A professor suggested they collaborate.

The pair spent two months on the design – five gates reminiscent of the Olympic torch flame, with Chinese calligraphy subtly etched on the inner edge of each – and months more on the scale model. About 2,500 designs entered the contest, with 290 chosen as finalists. Of those, 110 were picked to tour internationally.

Only three were from America. Fuller and Cinnamon’s design was among them.

For the past year, their scale model has toured 35 countries and 38 cities

“What’s really lovely is to know that literally millions of people have seen these designs,” Cinnamon said. “The traveling exhibitions were held, by and large, outdoors, on major thoroughfares of major cities around the world, and people who never go into a museum or a gallery simply got to see them because they were walking along.”

Visitors voted for their favorites during the tour, and the most popular 29 received gold, silver or bronze medals. Fuller and Cinnamon’s sculpture didn’t receive a medal, but it did get one of 50 Olympic Ring Awards.

The pair accepted the award – a small, bronze statue – during a ceremony in Beijing on May 31. They were honored by the award and by the red-carpet ceremony, which also paid tribute to the survivors and heroes of the recent earthquake there.

They were also honored to meet, talk and plan collaborations with their fellow international artists.

“We need more international exhibitions of art that sort of cross these cultural lines. Less funding of war, more funding of things that enable humans to understand each other,” Fuller said. “It’s easy to become cynical and say ‘Ah, it’s not going to do anything,” but I’ve seen it do something. And I think it can do a lot more if we do more of it.”